August 27, 2012 • 31 mins
Catastrophic storms are almost historical characters in their own right, leaving indelible marks on the places they affect. Here, we cover five of history's most destructive storms, including the Tri-state Tornado of 1925, the Great Hurricane of 1780, the Galveston hurricane of 1900, the Freshwater storm surge at Lake Okeechobee 1928 and the Bhola Cyclone of 1970.
Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.com
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class from how
Stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm double your chalk reboarding and I'm faired out. And
since we're in the middle of Atlantic hurricane season in
our part of the world, and maybe it's also a
(00:22):
little bit because it's been really stormy here all week,
so we've got storms on the brain, we feel i'd
be interesting to take a look at some historical storms.
After all, the truly big ones really are kind of
characters and their own right, and they often change the
story of whatever area they decide to visit and the
lives of the people who live there. I think that's
really emphasized by the fact that we give them names
(00:44):
now that they really do have sort of a personality,
and those names become almost taboo in the immediate years
after a really big storm hit. And I think that's
especially true with Hurricane Katrina, though a recent storm in
recent history. You know, we're not gonna be about Katrina
on the podcast today, but it certainly comes to mind
if you're thinking about really giant storms in the United States.
(01:07):
Right It was a Category five storm, led to severe
flooding and spawned tornadoes that killed around eighteen hundred people
across several states. But as Sarah said, we're not going
to get into Katrina in this podcast so much today,
but it did get us thinking a lot about some
of the most destructive storms that left their marks on
the world over time. So we're gonna take a look
(01:28):
at just a handful of those. We're not going to
cover them all by any means today, but we're gonna
take a look at a few that we think are
pretty interesting. We are, so we're gonna start back in
nineteen five with a tornado. And most of the storms
we're gonna be talking about our hurricanes or cyclones um
cyclones in the um the non American sense of Dorothy
(01:50):
and the oz. But this one is a true tornado,
the Tri State tornado. And your average tornado is about
five hundred to two thousand feet y it and it
travels at about a speed of thirty miles per hour,
So pretty scary even if you just leave it at that.
We had a tornado in Atlanta a few years ago,
went right through downtown. It was a scary storm, it was.
(02:12):
But this next entry on our list, the ninet Tri
State Tornado, was massive enough to leave that tornado and
most typical tornadoes that we encounter in this country in
the dust. It formed at about one pm on March eighteenth,
n somewhere around the town of Ellington and southeastern Missouri,
and it was nearly a mile wide, moving in an
(02:34):
average speed of about sixty two miles per hour and
at times even up to seventy three miles per hour.
It was possibly because of that great width that a
lot of people who saw the storm coming didn't even
realize at first that it was a tornado. Looked like
a cloud wall right, And according to an article by
Sean Potter and Weatherwise magazine, W. F. Haywood, who was
(02:54):
the postmaster for Ellington, made one of the first recorded
sightings of the tornado, and he just observed it as
a quote blue black cloud mass that was coming toward them.
He was lucky, though, compared to some who didn't even
see it coming at all. Yeah, people described being in
buildings when windows suddenly started to shatter, walls came crumbling down,
(03:16):
whole houses were just lifted off the ground. Wizard of
As style. Definitely and too late if you realize you're
in a tornado. But it moved quickly too, so even
though it was so giant, it was moving along at
quite a clip. It covered a lot of ground. It
hit parts of Missouri, Illinois, and Indiana, traveling a total
of two hundred nineteen miles and only three and a
(03:37):
half hours, which was more than thirty six times as
much as an average tornado covers more than thirty six
times as much ground. In an article on American Heritage,
Wallas Aken calls it quote the longest uninterrupted track on
a record. In total, six people were killed and more
than two thousand were injured as a result of the storm.
(03:59):
Fifteen thousand homes were destroyed. The town that was hardest hit,
which is one we want to kind of give a
few details about, was Murphy'sboro, Illinois. Two hundred and thirty
four people died in that town alone, and that's set
a record for the most tornado fatalities in a single place.
And Aiken, the writer that we just mentioned, he was
actually a toddler living in Murphy's Borough when the tornado
(04:20):
struck and his article that we mentioned relates some stories
of residents and others who lived through the experience. I
think he also has a book on the subject, and
one one story that he relates that I found particularly
chilling involves the town's children who were in school at
the time that the tornado struck. The school building basically
collapsed on the kids died. Some who survived struggled out
(04:44):
from under the debris on their own and headed for
their homes. You know, it's a natural instinct for kids.
You know, I'm gonna head for home. I'm going to
find my family. But they found in many cases that
their homes were completely gone, even the entire neighborhoods had vanished.
One friend of Aiken's recalled reaching his home what he
what should have been his home, which was nothing but
(05:07):
an open field, with her grandmother in the middle of it,
decapitated and still sitting in her rocking chair. So completely
horrifying sight. After surviving and already horrifying situation. Yeah, and
horrific sites like these seemed pretty typical for those who
managed to live through that initial chaos, since there were
plenty of dead and injured people around who needed tending to.
(05:29):
Medical teams and supplies started to pour in from all
over the country. One point that I thought was interesting,
According to Potter's article, Chicago even offered up some liquor
that had been confiscated by the federal government after some
prohibition raids, and so they quote and made this available
in a medicinal way to the storm suffers. There's a
(05:50):
silver lining um to this disaster in a way raised
public awareness about tornadoes. I was really interested to find.
In this popular Mechanics article, John Galvin writes about how
even using the word tornado was considered taboo by the
National Weather Service at this time, basically because tornadoes were
so unpredictable. Talking about them was thought to cause pointless
(06:13):
panic that don't let people know until their houses they're rattling.
Well yeah, I mean, I don't know if they exactly
looked at it that way, but I guess they just
thought there was really no use since they could really
forecast them. Right. But after the tri State tornado, local
tornado spotting network started popping up, so people were more
aware and we're taking steps to protect themselves a little bit.
(06:36):
And of course, researchers know so much more about tornadoes
now than they did back then, so much so that
in recent years some have suggested that the Tri State
tornado might have actually been a family of tornadoes, not
one single tornado that was caused by a super self understorm.
So this theory hasn't been definitively proven, and I guess
may never be, but this remains the single deadliest tornado
(06:59):
and history because they can't prove that it was a
family of tornadoes. Well, so now that we've discussed that
type of storm pretty etherly, we're gonna move on to hurricanes,
and we're gonna be talking about a few hurricanes in
this episode, and the first one is the Great Hurricane
of seventeen eighty And today we're lucky that meteorologists have
the knowledge and the technology to estimate the strength of
(07:20):
storms and even predict their potential paths to some degree. So,
you know, you're just talking about you couldn't tell where
tornadoes were going. Imagine if you couldn't tell really where
a hurricane was going to go. I know, it's still
a little up in the air, but they can give
you some warning. But when you're talking about a storm
like the next one on our list, though, which happened
more than two hundred years ago, of course, there was
(07:41):
not that luxury, so modern researchers have had to piece
together some details regarding characteristics of the Great Hurricane of
seventeen eighty based on anecdotal evidence of the kind of
destruction that it caused, sort of having to look back
at it and figure out what the storm is really like. Yeah,
and that destruction that you just mentioned and was really significant,
(08:01):
to say the least. The fact that just considering the
fact that it stood out so much in what was
already an act of hurricane season that year, should hint
at that. But the death toll also speaks for itself.
More than twenty thousand people in the Eastern Caribbean lost
their lives, according to the Caribbean Disaster Emergency Response Agency.
Researchers estimate that the hurricane formed in the Atlantic and
(08:23):
moved westward very slowly, at about six nautical miles per hour.
The storm got to Barbados on October tenth, where, according
to Encyclopedia Britannica, it destroyed nearly all the homes on
the island and about four thousand, five hundred people lost
their lives. The hurricane went on to hit pretty much
every island from Tobago to the Leeward Islands to Hispaniola,
(08:44):
but the biggest death tolls came out of Barbados and Martinique,
where nine thousand people died, and also sent Eustatious, where
four thousand, five hundred people also died. Researchers also believed
that the Great Hurricane was a Category five winds greater
than two hundred miles per hour. And again they've guessed
that pieced it together just from reports of the storm
(09:06):
damage and examples of anecdotes that were offered up by
the Caribbean Disaster Emergency Response Agency. One of those examples
came from a letter sent in December of that year
from Sir George Rodney, and he wrote about the events
in Barbados and said, quote the strongest buildings in the
whole of the houses, most of which were stone and
(09:26):
remarkable for their solidity, gave way to the fury of
the wind and were torn up to their foundations. All
the forts destroyed, and many of the heavy cannon carried
upwards of a hundred feet from the forts. Had I
not been an eyewitness, and nothing could have induced me
to have believed it, more than six thousand persons perished
and all the inhabitants were entirely ruined. So pretty serious,
(09:51):
I mean, the sight of cannons blowing up into the air.
I think that's the strongest point he makes there. That's true.
But I think this other point made by Dr Gilbert
Blaine and a letter that he wrote, is also very interesting.
He says, quote, what will give a strong idea of
the force of the wind is anything many of them,
and the trees is what he was referring to, were
(10:11):
stripped of their bark. So today we know that this
hasn't been observed in hurricanes where winds are about two
hundred miles per hour. And that's why researchers guessed that
the winds had to be greater than that. So I
think that's so neat that they can compare the history
of of other trees and other wind speeds and figure
out this one from sight. Yeah, and the casualties here
(10:33):
weren't all on land either. Also of historical note here
is that the American Revolution was going on at a
time that this hurricane struck, which meant that plenty of
European naval forces, both British and French, were concentrated in
the Caribbean. So thousands of soldiers died as their vessels
were damaged, destroyed swept away. Encyclopedia Britannicus says something like
(10:55):
more than forty French ships sank near Martinique alone. And
this is something I I've never heard mentioned when you
learn about the American Revolution, um, it seems like it
had to have shaken people up a little bit at least.
But Okay, so the next storm we're going to talk
about is certainly we're jumping ahead quite a bit. It's
a more modern storm, and it's one that I'm getting
(11:15):
a lot of you, especially if you're in the United States,
have probably heard about before. It has the distinction of
being known as the greatest natural disaster in US history. Yeah.
It took place in Galveston, Texas and nineteen hundred and
is sometimes known simply as the Galveston Storm. Galveston at
the time was one of the wealthiest cities in America,
and it was the largest city in Texas and a
(11:37):
big trade center Boomtown located on a barrier island in
the Gulf of Mexico. Galveston had gotten the message before
that it should do some storm preparation, including maybe constructing
a sea wall, and they'd seen nearby towns destroyed by
hurricanes in previous years, but they still didn't make any
moves to fortify the city prior to nineteen hundred. The
(11:59):
city got its first inkling that a storm was headed
its way in early September of that year, and what
started out as an area of quote unsettled weather near
the Windward Islands became a tropical storm that moved over
Cuba and hit Louisiana and Mississippi on the way to Texas,
so by the time it reached Galveston, though in September,
(12:19):
it was about a category four hurricane by modern estimates.
Again meteorologists or having to do some backtracking here. When
it first reached Galveston in the morning, it caused them flooding,
but it was still sunny out, and according to an
article by check Lions and History Magazine, most locals weren't
too concerned about the storm. They'd seen big storms before
(12:40):
living on the Gulf. They thought they could quote ride
it out, as sometimes people do in big storms like this.
But as the day went on, the wind started to
pick up, and it ultimately reached estimated speeds of about
a hundred and twenty two hundred thirty five miles per hour,
the highest speed recorded was actually one hundred miles per hour,
but there's a note or the wind instrument was destroyed
(13:02):
shortly after taking that measurement, so we can assume it
went quite a bit higher than that. The flooding also
got much worse. The rain just kept coming and the
tidal surges reached from eight to fifteen feet. People started
heading upwards, trying to get to the highest points that
they could in their homes, but it didn't really help.
The surges swept up homes from the foundation, and the
(13:24):
wind was just throwing trees and other objects around. So
it was just utter chaos. And we should note too
that as the Barrier Island, Galveston, of course, was very
low low to the sea, there was no high ground
to really get to. According to another article by Potter
and Weatherwise magazine, the entire southeast and west areas of
(13:44):
the city were just wiped out pretty much. All the
houses were just swept away. Most other buildings were destroyed too.
There were debris everywhere. There were bodies alive and dead,
trapped under the buildings. Potter quotes Isaac Klein, who was
in charge of the Augustin Weather Bureau office at the time,
is saying the site the next day was quote one
of the most horrible sites that ever civilized people looked upon.
(14:08):
Anywhere between six thousand and twelve thousand people died as
a result of this hurricane. Estimates usually sort of waiver
around I guess six thousand, but as many of these storms,
as they do for many of these storms, we have
a huge spans of numbers here. Yeah, and the exact
number of people who died may never be known. People
(14:28):
were drowned, of course, crushed by debris, and nearly ninety
kids in a local orphanage were killed, just an example
of some of the people who died in this storm.
About thirty thousand were left homeless too. Relief came in
from other areas of the country, but there were so
many dead bodies had to be burned for weeks after
the storm because there was just no way to bury
(14:51):
them all efficiently. Galveston never quite recaptured the prominence that
it once had, according to Lions article, but it did
survive and managed to reb old. One of the results
of what happened than nineteen oh to the city started
building a seventeen foot sea wall to protect itself and
houses and buildings were kind of raised up to that
level too, so there's more awareness again to keep this
(15:15):
from happening. Galveston really ended up having to almost raise
the entire city so they'd be a little safer. So
we're gonna be moving on now to another hurricane, but
before we do that, we need to discuss the relative
merits of coastal living in inland living. And it's say,
one of the obvious perks of living by the coast
is that you're near the beach, but one of the
(15:35):
upsides of living far inland is that you're usually spared
the full brunt of a hurricane, plus really terrifying side
effects like tsunami's if you're if you're in the cyclone
territory or storm surges, you're not completely off the hook. Though. Unfortunately,
in nineteen and extremely rare natural disaster occurred. It was
(15:58):
a freshwater storm surge at Lake Okeechobee in south central Florida,
which is just north of the what we think of
the Everglades today and forty miles northwest of Palm Beach,
and that surge plus the effects of the hurricane itself,
killed up to three thousand people, meaning that it came
pretty close to Galveston, depending on which numbers you're using
(16:20):
for Galveston as the deadliest storm in US history. In
the early twentieth century, South Florida underwent a huge development boom.
Just to give you some background on this area, Areas
like Palm Beach, which is an Atlantic Barrier island, attracted
the wealthy, while many of the inland everglade areas, including
the area around Lake Okeechobee, were drained for agriculture, and
(16:43):
according to Noah, only about fifty thousand people were living
in South Florida at the time, so migrant laborers from
mostly the Bahamas arrived to do the farm work and
set up small towns around the lake. So those are
two focused areas, really different world economically, but both clearly
very vulnerable to weather. One a barrier island, always vulnerable.
(17:03):
The other small towns with shoddy structures sitting plumb next
to one of the largest freshwater lakes in the country
that only happened to be about twelve to fifteen feet
above sea levels. So again, according to Noah, the storm
we're discussing first hit Land about September twelfth. Ninety three
(17:24):
people were killed when it swept over Puerto Rico. From there,
it moved through the Bahamas and hit the mainland on
September sixt right in Palm Beach County, and the coast
was really badly damaged by the wind the storm, but
warnings had allowed many people to evacuate or to take
cover inland. Though water from the storm caused Lake Okotobe
(17:45):
to start to pool. You know, we mentioned that it's
a very large lake, it's also a very shallow lake.
And finally it broke through this short, inadequate muck levy
that was meant to protect the settlements to itself and
the freshwater storms are then at that point rose about
twelve feet around the lake, drowning people in the low
(18:06):
lying area in flooding towns like Belglade, South Bay, and
Canal Point, as well as other towns. And we mentioned
a minute ago that the death toll could have been
as high as three thousand. But there have been so
many recalculations regarding this storm over the years, and I
mentioned earlier that there's a lot of discrepancy in many
of these numbers, and we'll discuss some of the reasons
(18:28):
for that more later. But for this storm, it seems
like there were some racial politics involved. Different sources from
immediately after the flood ranged from one thousand dead from
the Miami Herald to two thousand, three hundred dead in
the Miami Daily News. So let's talk about that for
a second. Why was there so much confusion and miscalculation?
(18:48):
According to the American Meteorological Society and Russell post And
estimated three quarters of the dead were field workers, mostly
non white migratory workers. Many of them were only known
to even friends by their nicknames. Many of the bodies
were lost. Post article includes a quote describing how the
surge carried people into the quote sawgrass waste and the
(19:12):
search for bodies ended November one because of lack of funds.
So they just mixture of of not being able to
actually locate the bodies and just not knowing who was
there alive in the first place. Right. Many of the
black dead and some of the white dead also were
buried in segregated mass graves. Simultaneous segregated memorial services were
(19:35):
held Sunday, September thirty and West Palm Beach. Mary McLeod
Bethune attended one of the black services. She was a
big thil rights activist and educator at the time. Economically, though,
the storm was also really damaging. It caused an estimated
twenty five million dollars in damages, which is now equal
(19:56):
to about sixteen billion dollars if you adjust for wealth, population,
and inflation. According to Post, it also ended the boom
of the nineteen twenties South Florida development because only two
years earlier there had been a similarly large storm that
had destroyed a lot of Miami, so people buying their
luxury houses were starting to realize this was a risky
(20:18):
area to live in. And that's why this one reminds
me so much of the Galveston storm, because it really
affected the whole trajectory of the of the city and
the area. Another note here of the literary variety, okachobe,
if it rang a bell for you, it might be
from readings Orneil Hurston's their eyes were watching God. Not
(20:39):
to give anything away, but it's a major plot device
between the heroine and the character Teacake. Florty and Hurston
hadn't been in the state during the storm, but according
to Valerie Boyd, she combined her interviews with survivors plus
her own experience in a storm in the Bahamas to
create a realistic scene. And I have to say it's
probably been about ten or so years since I read
(21:01):
that book. I can remember the storm then. So our
final storm for this list is the Bolla cyclone of
nineteen seventy and many of the storms we've discussed so
far have been truly extraordinary storms, truly large storms. The
Bula cyclone, though, could have been just an average or
(21:21):
maybe even under the right circumstances, a mild storm had
it not hit where it did and had it not
hit when it did. As it worked out, though, the storm,
which is also called the Ganges Brahmaputra Delta cyclone, became
one of the deadliest, if not the deadliest tropical cyclone
on record. It's also one of the world's worst natural disasters.
(21:43):
The storm formed over the Bay of Bengal November eighth,
nineteen seventy, and this was after the traditional season's end,
so most people weren't even expecting more storms and we're
already kind of at max flood capacity for the year.
It was also headed for the Ganges Delta, which was
in a part of East Pakistan and one of the flattest,
(22:03):
most flood prone regions of the world, flooding is expected.
It's what delivers the rich sediment that makes the soil
so fertile, but it also makes the land unstable since
many rivers criss crossed the region. Yeah. For instance, many
structures are built on these small sediment made islands that
only last a few years. You know, the sediment washes
away new islands form, so understandably, building temporary structures like this,
(22:29):
you don't build really solid ones, really sturdy buildings and houses.
But because the soil in this region is so rich
from all that sediment, the Delta is also one of
the most densely populated areas of the world, really comparable
to the Netherlands, which is I think Europe's most populated
country or densely populated rather. According to Benjamin Riley in
(22:51):
Disaster and Human History Case Studies in Nature, Society and Catastrophe,
in the decade before the flood, the population in the
Delta region had increased by about thirty percent, meaning that
farmers were already having to push further into the mangrove
forest buffer by the coast in order to eke out
a living and it also meant that the population was
(23:12):
really young. There were a lot of very young children
at the time. So already there's this out of season
storm and it was the sixth of the season, and
it's in a flood prone area with a dense population
living in mostly temporary housing. So just to set the
scene right there, and the storm made landfall as a
category three cyclone with a peak speed of one hundred
(23:34):
and fifteen miles per hour. It hit right at high
tide on a full moon night when people were sleeping.
Many of the migrant workers who had arrived for rice
harvests were sleeping outside. The storm surge created by the
cyclone reached about nineteen feet, wiping out everything that it hit.
Since there wasn't high ground, people climb trees only to
find themselves surrounded by snakes. And there's a really odd story.
(23:58):
I mean, I'd say take it with a of salt,
but it's mentioned by Riley. He discussed with a Mrs Kareem,
who credited a constrictor with saving her life. So most people,
I'm sure if you found yourself suddenly in the tree
with lots of snakes, that would be it. But she
remembers uh losing consciousness. But at that moment being wrapped
(24:19):
up by a constrictor who was really just trying to
cling to anything on the tree, and it ended up
saving her life and the life of her newborn child.
So kind of a wild storm story there, but I
guess you never know what what can happen, and in
instance like these. The death toll, though, was initially estimated
to be at about two d thousand, but it could
(24:41):
have been as high as five hundred thousand. And again,
just like we discussed with the Okeechobee hurricane, there are
a lot of reasons for why there's so much discrepancy here,
and again one is that there were probably a lot
of migrant workers among the dead, and nobody knew who
was there and nobody knew who they were. Plus undocumented residents,
you know, just people who hadn't registered in any sort
(25:04):
of way, and we mentioned this earlier, lots of young children,
so maybe they weren't even on the books yet. After
the storm, hundreds of thousands of people were left without food,
and since it had almost been harvest time, there were
no stores of anything either. Agricultural equipment had been washed away,
salt water had inundated farmland, livestock had drowned, The fishing
(25:26):
industry was destroyed, and drinking water was contaminated and people
contracted cholera from that. Many people were injured too, after
such a traumatic survival situation. They had broken bones, they
had abrasions on their arms and their chests and thighs, uh,
something that relief workers Alfred Summer and W. Henry Moseley
called quote cycling syndrome or quote the grim evidence of
(25:49):
the tenacity with which the survivors had clung to the
trees to withstand the buffeting of the waves. So, um,
just tearing yourself up trying to save your life and
the storm surge. Then despite all of these problems, you know,
despite the starvation and the injuries, the government wasn't able
to respond for ten days, which was something that ultimately
(26:11):
heightened tensions between East Pakistan and West Pakistan, and much
of the relief ultimately ended up coming from India and
the United States and later Great Britain and China, which
sent rice supplies for the people. So when an already
scheduled December election rolled around, a lot of new opposition
politicians ended up being elected, and ultimately, after a civil war,
(26:33):
East Pakistan became the independent country of Bangladesh and one
of its early schools. Understandably, after all of this was
to set up better storm surge alert so that people
could be more prepared for for something like this happening again.
Just a side note here, Hassan Mushriqui, a professor at
l s U, got a map of Bangladesh from his
(26:55):
father in law. He scanned the map for part of
his work predicting storm surges in the Gulf of mex Ago.
Since he wanted to work on developing similar models for Bangladesh.
He ended up creating an early warning system, which was
tested in two thousand seven when much freekly noted a
huge cyclone forming in the Bay of Bengal. The way
he went about spreading those warnings though it sounds so
(27:15):
round about, it's amazing that that it actually worked, But
he began communicating once he noticed this huge storm forming,
began communicating with the U. S. Navy to find out
how much the government um in the in the area
knew about what was going on, what kind of warnings
were already in place, And when he realized from family
that the storm wasn't really being treated very seriously, he
(27:36):
got in touch with a food and disaster official in
Bangladesh via his l s U freshman son and began
sharing information, began tracking the storm, and many people were
successfully evacuated from the areas identified as most at risk,
and he also helped retroactively target rescue efforts. Here's where
(27:57):
the storm went, Here's where you need to go more
and three thousand people still died, which sounds like a
huge number, but it was far fewer than a lot
of the earlier cyclones, including of course the bullet cyclone
that we already talked about. So I guess that's promising
that and most of these stories we've seen some sort
of progress, theology upgrade, whether it is building a wall,
(28:20):
you know, acknowledging the fact that your city is in
pretty serious danger, or uh, having some sort of software,
having an early warning system in place can save lots
of lives. Yeah, and just that awareness that people have,
I mean it's sad. I thinking it seriously, yeah, taking
it seriously, not thinking that you're going to write it out.
I mean, I lived on the Gulf coast for a while,
(28:41):
and so I can relate to that idea that so
many people just get numb to the experience that they
just think they can, you know, they can hang out
during the storm. They've like, we've been through this before,
gone through false evacuations, evacuations that come to nothing but
better safement. Sorry, definitely, it's funny too. We all kind
of have our own sort of storm stories. I don't
(29:03):
know if you have any that you remember, Sarah, maybe
tornadoes that you have hunkered down through. Yeah. I remember
being a very little kid and there being a tornado
in Atlanta and I was at ballet class. I was
probably about every year four, and I remember all the
little kids getting taken to the basement and we had
(29:26):
a very hungry caterpillar read to us. My my biggest
scary storm memory, I think, which is pretty good. Yeah.
I remember when I was living in Mobile, I had
to I think this was we had to evacuate when
George came and I had a kind of beat up
(29:47):
Toyota Pisseo that I drove at the time, and I
remember driving up state to where my parents live and
just kind of blowing all over the road and for
the first time, because I like little cars, but I
was thinking, I really wish I had like one of
those big something really heavy to kind of anchor me
down at this point, but we'll send us your storm stories.
(30:08):
I mean, I guess living in Atlanta, we're most likely
to experience tornadoes, hurricanes, we get we get pretty heavy
hurricanes from time to time, um, not coastal levels of course.
And then the occasional freak ice storm. Oh that's true.
We had one of those a couple of years ago.
So feel free to share your most interesting storm stories
(30:29):
with us. Why they're on Facebook, on our Twitter at
Miston History can email them to us at History Podcast
at Discovery dot com. Would be interested. I mean, those
are everybody likes freakish weather stories, right, that's true. And
if you want to learn a little bit more about
some of the storms that we talked about today and
some additional ones, we have a great article on our
(30:50):
site called ten most Destructive Storms. You can look at
it by visiting our homepage at www. Dot how stuff
works dot com for more on this and thousands of
other topics. Is it how stuff works dot com? M
(31:15):
M M M
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class from how
Stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm double your chalk reboarding and I'm faired out. And
since we're in the middle of Atlantic hurricane season in
our part of the world, and maybe it's also a
(00:22):
little bit because it's been really stormy here all week,
so we've got storms on the brain, we feel i'd
be interesting to take a look at some historical storms.
After all, the truly big ones really are kind of
characters and their own right, and they often change the
story of whatever area they decide to visit and the
lives of the people who live there. I think that's
really emphasized by the fact that we give them names
(00:44):
now that they really do have sort of a personality,
and those names become almost taboo in the immediate years
after a really big storm hit. And I think that's
especially true with Hurricane Katrina, though a recent storm in
recent history. You know, we're not gonna be about Katrina
on the podcast today, but it certainly comes to mind
if you're thinking about really giant storms in the United States.
(01:07):
Right It was a Category five storm, led to severe
flooding and spawned tornadoes that killed around eighteen hundred people
across several states. But as Sarah said, we're not going
to get into Katrina in this podcast so much today,
but it did get us thinking a lot about some
of the most destructive storms that left their marks on
the world over time. So we're gonna take a look
(01:28):
at just a handful of those. We're not going to
cover them all by any means today, but we're gonna
take a look at a few that we think are
pretty interesting. We are, so we're gonna start back in
nineteen five with a tornado. And most of the storms
we're gonna be talking about our hurricanes or cyclones um
cyclones in the um the non American sense of Dorothy
(01:50):
and the oz. But this one is a true tornado,
the Tri State tornado. And your average tornado is about
five hundred to two thousand feet y it and it
travels at about a speed of thirty miles per hour,
So pretty scary even if you just leave it at that.
We had a tornado in Atlanta a few years ago,
went right through downtown. It was a scary storm, it was.
(02:12):
But this next entry on our list, the ninet Tri
State Tornado, was massive enough to leave that tornado and
most typical tornadoes that we encounter in this country in
the dust. It formed at about one pm on March eighteenth,
n somewhere around the town of Ellington and southeastern Missouri,
and it was nearly a mile wide, moving in an
(02:34):
average speed of about sixty two miles per hour and
at times even up to seventy three miles per hour.
It was possibly because of that great width that a
lot of people who saw the storm coming didn't even
realize at first that it was a tornado. Looked like
a cloud wall right, And according to an article by
Sean Potter and Weatherwise magazine, W. F. Haywood, who was
(02:54):
the postmaster for Ellington, made one of the first recorded
sightings of the tornado, and he just observed it as
a quote blue black cloud mass that was coming toward them.
He was lucky, though, compared to some who didn't even
see it coming at all. Yeah, people described being in
buildings when windows suddenly started to shatter, walls came crumbling down,
(03:16):
whole houses were just lifted off the ground. Wizard of
As style. Definitely and too late if you realize you're
in a tornado. But it moved quickly too, so even
though it was so giant, it was moving along at
quite a clip. It covered a lot of ground. It
hit parts of Missouri, Illinois, and Indiana, traveling a total
of two hundred nineteen miles and only three and a
(03:37):
half hours, which was more than thirty six times as
much as an average tornado covers more than thirty six
times as much ground. In an article on American Heritage,
Wallas Aken calls it quote the longest uninterrupted track on
a record. In total, six people were killed and more
than two thousand were injured as a result of the storm.
(03:59):
Fifteen thousand homes were destroyed. The town that was hardest hit,
which is one we want to kind of give a
few details about, was Murphy'sboro, Illinois. Two hundred and thirty
four people died in that town alone, and that's set
a record for the most tornado fatalities in a single place.
And Aiken, the writer that we just mentioned, he was
actually a toddler living in Murphy's Borough when the tornado
(04:20):
struck and his article that we mentioned relates some stories
of residents and others who lived through the experience. I
think he also has a book on the subject, and
one one story that he relates that I found particularly
chilling involves the town's children who were in school at
the time that the tornado struck. The school building basically
collapsed on the kids died. Some who survived struggled out
(04:44):
from under the debris on their own and headed for
their homes. You know, it's a natural instinct for kids.
You know, I'm gonna head for home. I'm going to
find my family. But they found in many cases that
their homes were completely gone, even the entire neighborhoods had vanished.
One friend of Aiken's recalled reaching his home what he
what should have been his home, which was nothing but
(05:07):
an open field, with her grandmother in the middle of it,
decapitated and still sitting in her rocking chair. So completely
horrifying sight. After surviving and already horrifying situation. Yeah, and
horrific sites like these seemed pretty typical for those who
managed to live through that initial chaos, since there were
plenty of dead and injured people around who needed tending to.
(05:29):
Medical teams and supplies started to pour in from all
over the country. One point that I thought was interesting,
According to Potter's article, Chicago even offered up some liquor
that had been confiscated by the federal government after some
prohibition raids, and so they quote and made this available
in a medicinal way to the storm suffers. There's a
(05:50):
silver lining um to this disaster in a way raised
public awareness about tornadoes. I was really interested to find.
In this popular Mechanics article, John Galvin writes about how
even using the word tornado was considered taboo by the
National Weather Service at this time, basically because tornadoes were
so unpredictable. Talking about them was thought to cause pointless
(06:13):
panic that don't let people know until their houses they're rattling.
Well yeah, I mean, I don't know if they exactly
looked at it that way, but I guess they just
thought there was really no use since they could really
forecast them. Right. But after the tri State tornado, local
tornado spotting network started popping up, so people were more
aware and we're taking steps to protect themselves a little bit.
(06:36):
And of course, researchers know so much more about tornadoes
now than they did back then, so much so that
in recent years some have suggested that the Tri State
tornado might have actually been a family of tornadoes, not
one single tornado that was caused by a super self understorm.
So this theory hasn't been definitively proven, and I guess
may never be, but this remains the single deadliest tornado
(06:59):
and history because they can't prove that it was a
family of tornadoes. Well, so now that we've discussed that
type of storm pretty etherly, we're gonna move on to hurricanes,
and we're gonna be talking about a few hurricanes in
this episode, and the first one is the Great Hurricane
of seventeen eighty And today we're lucky that meteorologists have
the knowledge and the technology to estimate the strength of
(07:20):
storms and even predict their potential paths to some degree. So,
you know, you're just talking about you couldn't tell where
tornadoes were going. Imagine if you couldn't tell really where
a hurricane was going to go. I know, it's still
a little up in the air, but they can give
you some warning. But when you're talking about a storm
like the next one on our list, though, which happened
more than two hundred years ago, of course, there was
(07:41):
not that luxury, so modern researchers have had to piece
together some details regarding characteristics of the Great Hurricane of
seventeen eighty based on anecdotal evidence of the kind of
destruction that it caused, sort of having to look back
at it and figure out what the storm is really like. Yeah,
and that destruction that you just mentioned and was really significant,
(08:01):
to say the least. The fact that just considering the
fact that it stood out so much in what was
already an act of hurricane season that year, should hint
at that. But the death toll also speaks for itself.
More than twenty thousand people in the Eastern Caribbean lost
their lives, according to the Caribbean Disaster Emergency Response Agency.
Researchers estimate that the hurricane formed in the Atlantic and
(08:23):
moved westward very slowly, at about six nautical miles per hour.
The storm got to Barbados on October tenth, where, according
to Encyclopedia Britannica, it destroyed nearly all the homes on
the island and about four thousand, five hundred people lost
their lives. The hurricane went on to hit pretty much
every island from Tobago to the Leeward Islands to Hispaniola,
(08:44):
but the biggest death tolls came out of Barbados and Martinique,
where nine thousand people died, and also sent Eustatious, where
four thousand, five hundred people also died. Researchers also believed
that the Great Hurricane was a Category five winds greater
than two hundred miles per hour. And again they've guessed
that pieced it together just from reports of the storm
(09:06):
damage and examples of anecdotes that were offered up by
the Caribbean Disaster Emergency Response Agency. One of those examples
came from a letter sent in December of that year
from Sir George Rodney, and he wrote about the events
in Barbados and said, quote the strongest buildings in the
whole of the houses, most of which were stone and
(09:26):
remarkable for their solidity, gave way to the fury of
the wind and were torn up to their foundations. All
the forts destroyed, and many of the heavy cannon carried
upwards of a hundred feet from the forts. Had I
not been an eyewitness, and nothing could have induced me
to have believed it, more than six thousand persons perished
and all the inhabitants were entirely ruined. So pretty serious,
(09:51):
I mean, the sight of cannons blowing up into the air.
I think that's the strongest point he makes there. That's true.
But I think this other point made by Dr Gilbert
Blaine and a letter that he wrote, is also very interesting.
He says, quote, what will give a strong idea of
the force of the wind is anything many of them,
and the trees is what he was referring to, were
(10:11):
stripped of their bark. So today we know that this
hasn't been observed in hurricanes where winds are about two
hundred miles per hour. And that's why researchers guessed that
the winds had to be greater than that. So I
think that's so neat that they can compare the history
of of other trees and other wind speeds and figure
out this one from sight. Yeah, and the casualties here
(10:33):
weren't all on land either. Also of historical note here
is that the American Revolution was going on at a
time that this hurricane struck, which meant that plenty of
European naval forces, both British and French, were concentrated in
the Caribbean. So thousands of soldiers died as their vessels
were damaged, destroyed swept away. Encyclopedia Britannicus says something like
(10:55):
more than forty French ships sank near Martinique alone. And
this is something I I've never heard mentioned when you
learn about the American Revolution, um, it seems like it
had to have shaken people up a little bit at least.
But Okay, so the next storm we're going to talk
about is certainly we're jumping ahead quite a bit. It's
a more modern storm, and it's one that I'm getting
(11:15):
a lot of you, especially if you're in the United States,
have probably heard about before. It has the distinction of
being known as the greatest natural disaster in US history. Yeah.
It took place in Galveston, Texas and nineteen hundred and
is sometimes known simply as the Galveston Storm. Galveston at
the time was one of the wealthiest cities in America,
and it was the largest city in Texas and a
(11:37):
big trade center Boomtown located on a barrier island in
the Gulf of Mexico. Galveston had gotten the message before
that it should do some storm preparation, including maybe constructing
a sea wall, and they'd seen nearby towns destroyed by
hurricanes in previous years, but they still didn't make any
moves to fortify the city prior to nineteen hundred. The
(11:59):
city got its first inkling that a storm was headed
its way in early September of that year, and what
started out as an area of quote unsettled weather near
the Windward Islands became a tropical storm that moved over
Cuba and hit Louisiana and Mississippi on the way to Texas,
so by the time it reached Galveston, though in September,
(12:19):
it was about a category four hurricane by modern estimates.
Again meteorologists or having to do some backtracking here. When
it first reached Galveston in the morning, it caused them flooding,
but it was still sunny out, and according to an
article by check Lions and History Magazine, most locals weren't
too concerned about the storm. They'd seen big storms before
(12:40):
living on the Gulf. They thought they could quote ride
it out, as sometimes people do in big storms like this.
But as the day went on, the wind started to
pick up, and it ultimately reached estimated speeds of about
a hundred and twenty two hundred thirty five miles per hour,
the highest speed recorded was actually one hundred miles per hour,
but there's a note or the wind instrument was destroyed
(13:02):
shortly after taking that measurement, so we can assume it
went quite a bit higher than that. The flooding also
got much worse. The rain just kept coming and the
tidal surges reached from eight to fifteen feet. People started
heading upwards, trying to get to the highest points that
they could in their homes, but it didn't really help.
The surges swept up homes from the foundation, and the
(13:24):
wind was just throwing trees and other objects around. So
it was just utter chaos. And we should note too
that as the Barrier Island, Galveston, of course, was very
low low to the sea, there was no high ground
to really get to. According to another article by Potter
and Weatherwise magazine, the entire southeast and west areas of
(13:44):
the city were just wiped out pretty much. All the
houses were just swept away. Most other buildings were destroyed too.
There were debris everywhere. There were bodies alive and dead,
trapped under the buildings. Potter quotes Isaac Klein, who was
in charge of the Augustin Weather Bureau office at the time,
is saying the site the next day was quote one
of the most horrible sites that ever civilized people looked upon.
(14:08):
Anywhere between six thousand and twelve thousand people died as
a result of this hurricane. Estimates usually sort of waiver
around I guess six thousand, but as many of these storms,
as they do for many of these storms, we have
a huge spans of numbers here. Yeah, and the exact
number of people who died may never be known. People
(14:28):
were drowned, of course, crushed by debris, and nearly ninety
kids in a local orphanage were killed, just an example
of some of the people who died in this storm.
About thirty thousand were left homeless too. Relief came in
from other areas of the country, but there were so
many dead bodies had to be burned for weeks after
the storm because there was just no way to bury
(14:51):
them all efficiently. Galveston never quite recaptured the prominence that
it once had, according to Lions article, but it did
survive and managed to reb old. One of the results
of what happened than nineteen oh to the city started
building a seventeen foot sea wall to protect itself and
houses and buildings were kind of raised up to that
level too, so there's more awareness again to keep this
(15:15):
from happening. Galveston really ended up having to almost raise
the entire city so they'd be a little safer. So
we're gonna be moving on now to another hurricane, but
before we do that, we need to discuss the relative
merits of coastal living in inland living. And it's say,
one of the obvious perks of living by the coast
is that you're near the beach, but one of the
(15:35):
upsides of living far inland is that you're usually spared
the full brunt of a hurricane, plus really terrifying side
effects like tsunami's if you're if you're in the cyclone
territory or storm surges, you're not completely off the hook. Though. Unfortunately,
in nineteen and extremely rare natural disaster occurred. It was
(15:58):
a freshwater storm surge at Lake Okeechobee in south central Florida,
which is just north of the what we think of
the Everglades today and forty miles northwest of Palm Beach,
and that surge plus the effects of the hurricane itself,
killed up to three thousand people, meaning that it came
pretty close to Galveston, depending on which numbers you're using
(16:20):
for Galveston as the deadliest storm in US history. In
the early twentieth century, South Florida underwent a huge development boom.
Just to give you some background on this area, Areas
like Palm Beach, which is an Atlantic Barrier island, attracted
the wealthy, while many of the inland everglade areas, including
the area around Lake Okeechobee, were drained for agriculture, and
(16:43):
according to Noah, only about fifty thousand people were living
in South Florida at the time, so migrant laborers from
mostly the Bahamas arrived to do the farm work and
set up small towns around the lake. So those are
two focused areas, really different world economically, but both clearly
very vulnerable to weather. One a barrier island, always vulnerable.
(17:03):
The other small towns with shoddy structures sitting plumb next
to one of the largest freshwater lakes in the country
that only happened to be about twelve to fifteen feet
above sea levels. So again, according to Noah, the storm
we're discussing first hit Land about September twelfth. Ninety three
(17:24):
people were killed when it swept over Puerto Rico. From there,
it moved through the Bahamas and hit the mainland on
September sixt right in Palm Beach County, and the coast
was really badly damaged by the wind the storm, but
warnings had allowed many people to evacuate or to take
cover inland. Though water from the storm caused Lake Okotobe
(17:45):
to start to pool. You know, we mentioned that it's
a very large lake, it's also a very shallow lake.
And finally it broke through this short, inadequate muck levy
that was meant to protect the settlements to itself and
the freshwater storms are then at that point rose about
twelve feet around the lake, drowning people in the low
(18:06):
lying area in flooding towns like Belglade, South Bay, and
Canal Point, as well as other towns. And we mentioned
a minute ago that the death toll could have been
as high as three thousand. But there have been so
many recalculations regarding this storm over the years, and I
mentioned earlier that there's a lot of discrepancy in many
of these numbers, and we'll discuss some of the reasons
(18:28):
for that more later. But for this storm, it seems
like there were some racial politics involved. Different sources from
immediately after the flood ranged from one thousand dead from
the Miami Herald to two thousand, three hundred dead in
the Miami Daily News. So let's talk about that for
a second. Why was there so much confusion and miscalculation?
(18:48):
According to the American Meteorological Society and Russell post And
estimated three quarters of the dead were field workers, mostly
non white migratory workers. Many of them were only known
to even friends by their nicknames. Many of the bodies
were lost. Post article includes a quote describing how the
surge carried people into the quote sawgrass waste and the
(19:12):
search for bodies ended November one because of lack of funds.
So they just mixture of of not being able to
actually locate the bodies and just not knowing who was
there alive in the first place. Right. Many of the
black dead and some of the white dead also were
buried in segregated mass graves. Simultaneous segregated memorial services were
(19:35):
held Sunday, September thirty and West Palm Beach. Mary McLeod
Bethune attended one of the black services. She was a
big thil rights activist and educator at the time. Economically, though,
the storm was also really damaging. It caused an estimated
twenty five million dollars in damages, which is now equal
(19:56):
to about sixteen billion dollars if you adjust for wealth, population,
and inflation. According to Post, it also ended the boom
of the nineteen twenties South Florida development because only two
years earlier there had been a similarly large storm that
had destroyed a lot of Miami, so people buying their
luxury houses were starting to realize this was a risky
(20:18):
area to live in. And that's why this one reminds
me so much of the Galveston storm, because it really
affected the whole trajectory of the of the city and
the area. Another note here of the literary variety, okachobe,
if it rang a bell for you, it might be
from readings Orneil Hurston's their eyes were watching God. Not
(20:39):
to give anything away, but it's a major plot device
between the heroine and the character Teacake. Florty and Hurston
hadn't been in the state during the storm, but according
to Valerie Boyd, she combined her interviews with survivors plus
her own experience in a storm in the Bahamas to
create a realistic scene. And I have to say it's
probably been about ten or so years since I read
(21:01):
that book. I can remember the storm then. So our
final storm for this list is the Bolla cyclone of
nineteen seventy and many of the storms we've discussed so
far have been truly extraordinary storms, truly large storms. The
Bula cyclone, though, could have been just an average or
(21:21):
maybe even under the right circumstances, a mild storm had
it not hit where it did and had it not
hit when it did. As it worked out, though, the storm,
which is also called the Ganges Brahmaputra Delta cyclone, became
one of the deadliest, if not the deadliest tropical cyclone
on record. It's also one of the world's worst natural disasters.
(21:43):
The storm formed over the Bay of Bengal November eighth,
nineteen seventy, and this was after the traditional season's end,
so most people weren't even expecting more storms and we're
already kind of at max flood capacity for the year.
It was also headed for the Ganges Delta, which was
in a part of East Pakistan and one of the flattest,
(22:03):
most flood prone regions of the world, flooding is expected.
It's what delivers the rich sediment that makes the soil
so fertile, but it also makes the land unstable since
many rivers criss crossed the region. Yeah. For instance, many
structures are built on these small sediment made islands that
only last a few years. You know, the sediment washes
away new islands form, so understandably, building temporary structures like this,
(22:29):
you don't build really solid ones, really sturdy buildings and houses.
But because the soil in this region is so rich
from all that sediment, the Delta is also one of
the most densely populated areas of the world, really comparable
to the Netherlands, which is I think Europe's most populated
country or densely populated rather. According to Benjamin Riley in
(22:51):
Disaster and Human History Case Studies in Nature, Society and Catastrophe,
in the decade before the flood, the population in the
Delta region had increased by about thirty percent, meaning that
farmers were already having to push further into the mangrove
forest buffer by the coast in order to eke out
a living and it also meant that the population was
(23:12):
really young. There were a lot of very young children
at the time. So already there's this out of season
storm and it was the sixth of the season, and
it's in a flood prone area with a dense population
living in mostly temporary housing. So just to set the
scene right there, and the storm made landfall as a
category three cyclone with a peak speed of one hundred
(23:34):
and fifteen miles per hour. It hit right at high
tide on a full moon night when people were sleeping.
Many of the migrant workers who had arrived for rice
harvests were sleeping outside. The storm surge created by the
cyclone reached about nineteen feet, wiping out everything that it hit.
Since there wasn't high ground, people climb trees only to
find themselves surrounded by snakes. And there's a really odd story.
(23:58):
I mean, I'd say take it with a of salt,
but it's mentioned by Riley. He discussed with a Mrs Kareem,
who credited a constrictor with saving her life. So most people,
I'm sure if you found yourself suddenly in the tree
with lots of snakes, that would be it. But she
remembers uh losing consciousness. But at that moment being wrapped
(24:19):
up by a constrictor who was really just trying to
cling to anything on the tree, and it ended up
saving her life and the life of her newborn child.
So kind of a wild storm story there, but I
guess you never know what what can happen, and in
instance like these. The death toll, though, was initially estimated
to be at about two d thousand, but it could
(24:41):
have been as high as five hundred thousand. And again,
just like we discussed with the Okeechobee hurricane, there are
a lot of reasons for why there's so much discrepancy here,
and again one is that there were probably a lot
of migrant workers among the dead, and nobody knew who
was there and nobody knew who they were. Plus undocumented residents,
you know, just people who hadn't registered in any sort
(25:04):
of way, and we mentioned this earlier, lots of young children,
so maybe they weren't even on the books yet. After
the storm, hundreds of thousands of people were left without food,
and since it had almost been harvest time, there were
no stores of anything either. Agricultural equipment had been washed away,
salt water had inundated farmland, livestock had drowned, The fishing
(25:26):
industry was destroyed, and drinking water was contaminated and people
contracted cholera from that. Many people were injured too, after
such a traumatic survival situation. They had broken bones, they
had abrasions on their arms and their chests and thighs, uh,
something that relief workers Alfred Summer and W. Henry Moseley
called quote cycling syndrome or quote the grim evidence of
(25:49):
the tenacity with which the survivors had clung to the
trees to withstand the buffeting of the waves. So, um,
just tearing yourself up trying to save your life and
the storm surge. Then despite all of these problems, you know,
despite the starvation and the injuries, the government wasn't able
to respond for ten days, which was something that ultimately
(26:11):
heightened tensions between East Pakistan and West Pakistan, and much
of the relief ultimately ended up coming from India and
the United States and later Great Britain and China, which
sent rice supplies for the people. So when an already
scheduled December election rolled around, a lot of new opposition
politicians ended up being elected, and ultimately, after a civil war,
(26:33):
East Pakistan became the independent country of Bangladesh and one
of its early schools. Understandably, after all of this was
to set up better storm surge alert so that people
could be more prepared for for something like this happening again.
Just a side note here, Hassan Mushriqui, a professor at
l s U, got a map of Bangladesh from his
(26:55):
father in law. He scanned the map for part of
his work predicting storm surges in the Gulf of mex Ago.
Since he wanted to work on developing similar models for Bangladesh.
He ended up creating an early warning system, which was
tested in two thousand seven when much freekly noted a
huge cyclone forming in the Bay of Bengal. The way
he went about spreading those warnings though it sounds so
(27:15):
round about, it's amazing that that it actually worked, But
he began communicating once he noticed this huge storm forming,
began communicating with the U. S. Navy to find out
how much the government um in the in the area
knew about what was going on, what kind of warnings
were already in place, And when he realized from family
that the storm wasn't really being treated very seriously, he
(27:36):
got in touch with a food and disaster official in
Bangladesh via his l s U freshman son and began
sharing information, began tracking the storm, and many people were
successfully evacuated from the areas identified as most at risk,
and he also helped retroactively target rescue efforts. Here's where
(27:57):
the storm went, Here's where you need to go more
and three thousand people still died, which sounds like a
huge number, but it was far fewer than a lot
of the earlier cyclones, including of course the bullet cyclone
that we already talked about. So I guess that's promising
that and most of these stories we've seen some sort
of progress, theology upgrade, whether it is building a wall,
(28:20):
you know, acknowledging the fact that your city is in
pretty serious danger, or uh, having some sort of software,
having an early warning system in place can save lots
of lives. Yeah, and just that awareness that people have,
I mean it's sad. I thinking it seriously, yeah, taking
it seriously, not thinking that you're going to write it out.
I mean, I lived on the Gulf coast for a while,
(28:41):
and so I can relate to that idea that so
many people just get numb to the experience that they
just think they can, you know, they can hang out
during the storm. They've like, we've been through this before,
gone through false evacuations, evacuations that come to nothing but
better safement. Sorry, definitely, it's funny too. We all kind
of have our own sort of storm stories. I don't
(29:03):
know if you have any that you remember, Sarah, maybe
tornadoes that you have hunkered down through. Yeah. I remember
being a very little kid and there being a tornado
in Atlanta and I was at ballet class. I was
probably about every year four, and I remember all the
little kids getting taken to the basement and we had
(29:26):
a very hungry caterpillar read to us. My my biggest
scary storm memory, I think, which is pretty good. Yeah.
I remember when I was living in Mobile, I had
to I think this was we had to evacuate when
George came and I had a kind of beat up
(29:47):
Toyota Pisseo that I drove at the time, and I
remember driving up state to where my parents live and
just kind of blowing all over the road and for
the first time, because I like little cars, but I
was thinking, I really wish I had like one of
those big something really heavy to kind of anchor me
down at this point, but we'll send us your storm stories.
(30:08):
I mean, I guess living in Atlanta, we're most likely
to experience tornadoes, hurricanes, we get we get pretty heavy
hurricanes from time to time, um, not coastal levels of course.
And then the occasional freak ice storm. Oh that's true.
We had one of those a couple of years ago.
So feel free to share your most interesting storm stories
(30:29):
with us. Why they're on Facebook, on our Twitter at
Miston History can email them to us at History Podcast
at Discovery dot com. Would be interested. I mean, those
are everybody likes freakish weather stories, right, that's true. And
if you want to learn a little bit more about
some of the storms that we talked about today and
some additional ones, we have a great article on our
(30:50):
site called ten most Destructive Storms. You can look at
it by visiting our homepage at www. Dot how stuff
works dot com for more on this and thousands of
other topics. Is it how stuff works dot com? M
(31:15):
M M M
Stuff You Missed in History Class News
Hosts And Creators
Holly Frey
Tracy Wilson
Popular Podcasts
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Follow now to get the latest episodes of Dateline NBC completely free, or subscribe to Dateline Premium for ad-free listening and exclusive bonus content: DatelinePremium.com
24/7 News: The Latest
The latest news in 4 minutes updated every hour, every day.
Therapy Gecko
An unlicensed lizard psychologist travels the universe talking to strangers about absolutely nothing. TO CALL THE GECKO: follow me on https://www.twitch.tv/lyleforever to get a notification for when I am taking calls. I am usually live Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays but lately a lot of other times too. I am a gecko.